Dear Student,
Today we did a case that illustrated the value of: a) creating a community b) joining a community and c) belonging to a community. We also learned that a community needs a platform (a meeting place) to engage, exchange, enable, empower and encourage individuals to be sustainable. It also needs to have a process, an incentive system, and defined goals (mission/vision) to keep the system vibrant and to keep it going. We recognized that establishing “Trust” is essential to administer the platform.
How do you plan to create the above in a City to achieve the above? be clear and specific about your recommendations and defend them.
The case illustrated that Threadless is not just a company but it’s a community where people are making exchanges through t-shirt designs. Essentially, they are building upon an ecosystem, where it is to the designer’s advantage to spread awareness and grow the community. Threadless acts as a facilitator and created a platform to host this community. Though it’s important to note that communities come in all shapes and sizes, and many of them do not have formalized processes, incentive systems, or defined goals. Thus to make it clear, the rest of the blog post, when I’m talking about community – I’m talking about the ones that are like Threadless, that has a business model which creates sustainable profit or cuts down costs.
One area that our group is focusing on is public safety – as I’ve mentioned in the previous post Oakland spends more than half of it’s budget on public safety which makes sense given the high crime rate. It seems that pouring money into the police force may not be the answer given the recent tensions. Perhaps, we can change this by aligning behavior with incentives. If we have groups of people monitoring their neighborhood by checking up on neighbors and reporting suspicious activities – then at the end of the month if the crime rate has been reduced, then the community can be awarded with some type of monetary or community building event. This type of behavior allows people to participate in the process, and gives them the chance to work on problems that they might have better solutions to. It is a formalized process with administrators tracking the crime rate and collecting data using sensors, it has incentives with the monetary awards conditioned on the reduction in crime rates, and finally the vision/mission is to reduce crime rate by building social cohesion. Social cohesion is important because it creates greater trust and cooperation, which allows individuals greater access to resources. The utilization of resources could increase economic participation, generating revenue and increasing value (see figure 1). Although there is a lot of factors that go into preventing crime, one can try to implement this in neighborhoods and test it for a control/treatment group. If the crime rate is reduced, then the city of Oakland would not have to spend so much on public safety – thus reducing costs, and perhaps implementing the newly generated revenue into other projects.
Source of figure 1: http://leadinganswers.typepad.com/leading_answers/2010/09/traditional-and-agile-pm-integration-pains-a-positive-sign.html
Today, we reviewed the business model of Threadless – the tee-shirt company first associated with the term “crowdsourcing.” The CEO of Threadless described their business model as “putting everything in the hands of the customers.” In essence, Threadless gives people incentive to grow the community themselves while building trust within a greater community. Ultimately, a city’s goal is to facilitate the social and economic environment of a city. San Francisco can learn from the Threadless business model in the following ways:
(1) Crowdsourcing
(2) Feedback loop
(3) Decreasing bureaucracy and costs
First, San Francisco can crowd source feedback, maintenance updates, traffic issues, and crime alerts. For example, a San Francisco mobile app that allows users to upload photos (that are automatically location tagged and filtered by content) of sidewalk cracks, potholes, and broken street lights, will reduce costs of maintenance monitoring. Think citizen-participation-based police dispatch for maintenance issues. Moreover, we could integrate a feature in Clipper Card that would track the capacity of MUNI buses (the more Clipper Cards tagged, the fuller the bus). Other users can then see how full a bus is and whether it is on time. The major challenge of the app would be users. Essentially, we must leverage the network effect to ensure maximum user participation.
Second, San Francisco’s integrative mobile app will create a self-sustaining feedback loop. The application can pull from threads on Facebook and Twitter to track what major issues are (these would be filtered by the system). As Team Berkeley discussed, users could up and down vote these issues, thereby allowing for city governance to focus on issues of biggest concern to the people – whether it be safety and maintenance or a problem as broad as gentrification. Overall, this feature would create transparency and promote civic engagement and exchange.
Third, crowdsourced input would decrease the city bureaucracy and overall costs. According to San Francisco’s financials, two of the highest costs are public safety and public works. By having a crowdsourced system for communicating safety alerts and maintenance issues, minimizing citizen wait-time for public transportation, overall cost efficiency and citizen productivity would be improved. Moreover, the CEO of Threadless stated that “if our users don’t trust us, they can destroy us.” The same logic can be applied to San Francisco. Though the CEO’s statement was an extreme for government, taking a more efficient (like Smart parking meters), transparent (like the SF Open Data project), issue-based approach would improve overall quality of life for all stakeholders.
The greatest challenges for an integrated system would be the initial cost, user buy-in, and private-public partnerships. The sustained cost reduction would outweigh the initial cost. User buy-in can be addressed through an incentive system – a small tax rebate (which can be donated to a local charity) for being an active user of the app. And private-public partnerships will develop inherently as the city develops the back-end infrastructure and implements additional IoT around the city.
Once overcome, the net effect of implementing the aforementioned systems would be a decrease in costs, increase in user participation in government, more efficient E-governance, and empowerment of residents to engage and exchange to make San Francisco smarter.
Threadless is an online marketplace which amalgamates the art of designers into a sell-able product, which is a T-shirt. Artists can engage with each other on the platform which serves as a communicative feedback mechanism. The administrators of the website and company also have profiles of their own, and also actively engage with the designers. This is what the professor means by creating, joining and belonging. The social patterns are the same, but the technology is different. This kind of community exists in infinite real-life examples. Taking a look at any of the student organizations, co-ops, greek life, weekly meetings serve as communication platforms where officers can be transparent on their strategies. This exists in cities as well. City hall. This exists at Haas- the Dean hosts a discussion each year to get student feedback. It may be useful to have him sit in our classes from time to time to get some real grassroots understanding.
Deriving a solution of how to create the above to achieve the above is not easy to answer and cannot be answered in a productive way because it is so vague. However, in a narrower scope using threadless as a model, I would say that creating incentives to promote sustainable behavior would be the way to encourage, exchange, engage… etc. These incentives can be the form of financial incentive, or more alternatively, validating citizen’s thought capital, or feeding into their social capital.
The use case that we studied about Threadless today shed light on the importance of not only building a product, but also building a community. When an idea, a business, or a city has a strong ecosystem of users and advocates, the community as a whole benefits from the increase in social connectivity, idea sharing, and overall citizen well being. As our group assessed ways to build a platform in the City of San Jose on which people can engage, exchange, enable, empower, and encourage others to be sustainable, we looked to create a community while simultaneously targeting the 2 key problems that the city is facing: high retirement costs and police expenditures.
In order to create an ecosystem of San Jose residents who feel mutually accountable for the city’s health and solve the pension and safety problems in the municipality, there are a few potential initial solutions:
(1) Incentivizing public workers to work longer, as their retirement pensions comprise of the largest proportion of retirement costs
(2) Encouraging younger people to move, work, and stay in the South Bay, rather than flock from schools such as Berkeley and Stanford to cities such as San Francisco and Mountain View
(3) Increasing open communication between government officials and city residents, including creating a committee that serves as a more active sounding board for citizen feedback
(4) Enhancing current safety mechanisms using more advanced sensor and surveillance technology that increases citizen participation in implementing safety precautions and reporting suspicious activity
While the first concept requires overcoming political barriers that we as college students may not have the power to effect right now, the latter 3 ideas seem to have significant potential, especially after our conversation with Param. As #3 and #4 have relatively simple programmatic recommendations, our group first assessed the feasibility of #2. Benchmarking the Threadless community which grew organically from existing designers and buyers on the website inviting their friends, voting for designs, and referring other designers, San Jose can learn from this type of organic growth by cultivating an attractive habitat for young people that naturally attracts more young talent, their families, and their employers. For instance, San Jose has already taken great strides in utilizing the Internet of Things to make downtown San Jose a more people-friendly, mobile-connected environment. Their partnership with Ruckus Wireless supports WiFi routers and connections to be installed in lampposts, providing free ubiquitous Internet access to all downtown residents and visitors. This is a particular perk for mobile-savvy young workers and would be effective at attracting further talent. In addition, the downtown neighborhoods can be renovated to become more urban, with an increase in the variety of activities such as nightlife, local theaters, and tourist attractions.
However, it may not be enough to simply create a more livable city for a younger generation, as people migrate to locations that are most convenient to their employers. Their employers need to move to the South Bay simultaneously, and the major employers are primarily migrating to nearby cities such as San Francisco and Mountain View. San Jose State University is one of the largest producers of engineers to local technology companies, and companies such as Cisco and eBay are the only corporations with major presences in San Jose—a stark contrast to Facebook, Google, and new startups that college students are actually attracted to. The municipality should step in to incentivize companies to either set up locations in San Jose if they do not have a current presence or encourage their college recruits to select San Jose as a top office choice. More specifically, the city can offer their vacant office spaces, which appears to be abundant on their financial statements, at reduced rates for new businesses, automated factories, and youth-friendly residential buildings. By attracting young talent to San Jose naturally, a community will grow organically the way the Threadless ecosystem did: young people attract other young people, who then attract businesses that also further attract young talent from colleges and universities. Ultimately, the City of San Jose can capture the value in property, commercial, and sales taxes generated by new businesses, residents, and local spending.
Today, we had the opportunity to engage with some case studies to see how other companies are creating innovative business models. One particular case, a company called Threadless, allows anyone to come to the website to design and create a t-shirt, the best of which are printed and sold from the site. This allows consumers to participate directly in what they want to see sold, as well as allowing for artists to gain exposure. The community that is built around the Threadless consumers and creators make the designers responsible for a huge amount of the growth. It is beneficial because the customers are self-promoting, so they are able to gain new customers and constantly supply updated designs. This process also makes the process of decision making more efficient, as everything is built on the opinions of the community. Trust, along with user participation, has enabled Threadless to create a more effective business model.
Because the ultimate goal of a city is to serve its citizens, this model of crowdsourcing and participation will allow city communities to come together and share innovative solutions as a group. This can be applied to our project for San Francisco by focusing on responses from the customers it is serving: its citizens. One idea that our group formulated to apply these ideas to a smart city infrastructure is to create an app for the city of San Francisco to get feedback on things like maintenance, public safety, and system breaks through responses from the citizens. This will enable city maintenance to be directed more quickly and effectively to the system break rather than dispatching teams to go check every light bulb or street corner. In terms of an incentive system, we hope to find a way to monetarily reward participants for every correct report by offering some sort of tax break. This will encourage individuals to use the app, and become self-sustaining as awareness is spread through word of mouth. Because interaction is through a government platform, citizens will be more likely to trust the app and each other’s reports. There are many innovative ways that these community-based ideas may be applied to our smart city project, and we plan to expand on these ideas further over the coming weeks.
Professor Darwin highlighted a critical and thought-provoking point during lecture today that all of us have to take into consideration as we continue to craft optimal solutions in the creation of our respective smart cities. A success and “smartness” of a city primarily stems from the active participation of the residents and people involved; without the creation of a strong community and attempt for full platform engagement, the implementation of technology and any other sustainable solutions will not promote an effective system. In my team’s specific case of San Jose, one of the main issues that it faces is not only the lack of a “community” platform, but also the engagement that current residents have towards the city. Although one of its greatest assets is Silicon Valley, this tends to be overlooked, as people prefer to congregate in cities like San Francisco instead. After our phone call with Param Singh, we realized that our smart city discussions unconsciously revolved around ways to increase the active engagement of citizen groups – and how to best utilize technology to achieve these goals.
In order to create a community platform within San Jose that would encourage the current residents to be sustainable, we need to increase opportunities for citizen groups to take responsibility for their neighborhoods. As the Internet of Things can introduce radical efficiency into a city through technology and reduce city capital expenditures by over 20%, we can best utilize this to fulfill both a qualitative and quantitative vision in our business model. A great example of increasing community engagement would be by providing technology to citizen awareness groups that may not necessarily displace the police force, but enhance their present ability – such as through wearable cameras that captures crime in real-time while citizens are carrying out their daily activities. This involves the concept of incorporating citizens as a part of the decision-making process, so they feel more responsibility towards the end result of the city’s approachable state of well-being (and not having to intervene in the direct danger of the crime itself which would in turn, affect their own personal safety). Creating this platform of transparent information sharing between the citizens, public service officials, and the government, establishes a collaborative environment of defined goals that the city of San Jose is trying to achieve in the long-term. Thus, this will allow it to be a sustainable city of the future.
I really enjoyed this lecture specifically because we got to learn about a successful company and their practices and immediately brainstorm and innovate with how we wanted to apply them to our own cities. What I learned from Threadless is that they put the ownership entirely in the hands of the designers and customers in their community. Instead of having focus groups and committees in their business, they simply utilize blogs and surveys that their customers read and reply to, giving them the instant feedback they require to do well. Additionally, their customers know and trust that the owners of Threadless act more as facilitators in the creative process of t-shirt designing rather than greedy business people. This is the aspect of the Threadless business model that I most want to apply to a city, the aspect of trusting your government, a community’s business, and education institutions to listen and inquire on creating change and implementing smart technology.
In our city of Oakland, one of the most important shifts that the city requires to become smarter is in the department of education. Specifically, taking lessons from the lecture about Threadless’s business model, the education system in Oakland would benefit from a restricting of its business model. From the financial statement release document of the city of Oakland, the following information is stated: the pupil to teacher ratio is 20:1 for K-3, 31:1 for grades 4-5, and 32:1 for 6-12 graders. The ratio of 31:1 is simply too high to create a sense of community for each student because it is difficult to feel accepted when one’s community is so large at such a young age. To address this, we can consider using Internet of Things technology to create a greater sense of community in the education system of Oakland. One example of this would be to create a mobile and iPad app that connects students together in elementary school and allows them to compare homework answers, shared interests, and even be able to collaborate on innovative ways to make the classroom setting more interactive. This type of innovation within the classrooms would inspire the young children of Oakland to create their only mobile apps and potentially even businesses. By doing this, it reinforces the entire driving force behind threadless which is making the community itself have ownership over the work that they do.
One other approach from Threadless is that since creating a sense of belonging is so important, schools in Oakland could utilize companies like Tyco or Cisco to implement sensors into schools. With this, it could track data, in elementary all the way up to adult schools, such as, how many students come to class on a given day or to measure how many cars are being used on regular days versus “bike to work days”. Sensors in schools could also be used to ensure that fire safety is up to code by installing the proper fire safety tools. These sensors could instill a sense of belonging by utilizing the data that the sensors collect to create a psychologically more inviting school space, cafeterias that promote healthy eating, and playgrounds that bring students to work together.
Creating change in the education system of Oakland may be daunting, but with small steps through the implementation of technology in schools will promote and drive innovation in Oakland and throughout the bay area.
One of San Jose’s major challenges remains attracting young talent and businesses to the city despite being the “Capital of the Silicon Valley.” As our team begins to formulate strategies to make San Jose more attractive to younger people and therefore businesses seeking to hire these individuals, we can learn from the Threadless case study. More specifically, we can learn from its emphasis on community as a means of organically growing a business and fostering loyalty among members. I believe that three key aspects of Threadless’ community led to its success: 1) the members all share common interests, 2) the website provides an outlet for these members to engage with this interest (either as a designer, voter, or buyer), and 3) the website creates a space with a high concentration of people with this interest that would otherwise be unconnected.
San Jose’s inability to attract recent college graduates is in large part due to the lack of concentration of young professionals within the city and a lack of amenities that appeal to this age group. For example, my team has observed that most graduates from UC Berkeley would choose the San Francisco office over the San Jose office for businesses that have both simply because they will be closer to their friends and have countless opportunities to meet other recent graduates. In contrast, downtown San Jose has a lower concentration of young professionals despite having a larger overall population than San Francisco. While this may appear to be a “chicken-and-egg” problem, one solution may be to survey young individuals within cities such as San Francisco to better understand what aspect of the city is most important to them, and then to assess whether San Jose is meeting these needs. By investing in the downtown area and offering amenities or perks that make it more appealing to recent graduates, San Jose can help spur rapid growth in its younger population and begin attracting businesses that are currently choosing cities such as San Francisco instead. Although this is just the first step in addressing this challenge, improving the downtown area with lead to a higher concentration of young people (#3) and allow these individuals to engage in their interests together (#2), and this will therefore create a community that exhibits increased loyalty towards and pride in the city.
Over the past few decades, technical innovation has continued to grow; however, it has grown at a staggered rate. Changes in computing, mobile devices, and digital media have transformed how people communicate. As such, a new kind of innovation has taken root: crowdsourcing. Companies, ranging from large corporations such as Apple to small grass-root foundations, have begun to employ crowdsourcing as a means to rapidly drive innovation, improve products, and increase customer involvement, and thereby increase customer satisfaction. In using the crowdsourcing model, companies leverage the knowledge of the consumer and create micro-tasks for them to complete in order to contribute to a larger macro-task.
In class, we were introduced to a T-shirt company based in Chicago by the name of Threadless. The company has created a product and an Internet-based platform for consumers to partake in all levels of the business from submitting a design, voting for winning ones, and purchasing the T-shirt. Founder, Jake Nickell, was quoted saying, “[I wanted to] give the creative minds of the world more opportunities to make and sell great art.” 2.1 million users later, Threadless has not only become a profitable business but also created a community and space for artists to interact on a global scale.
A similar model could definitely benefit Berkeley when envisioning it as a smart city. In our call with Param Singh after lecture, our team had a better sense of the types of issues to isolate when creating solutions and fixes to issues Berkeley currently faces. Specifically, we touched upon the issue of a lack of street lighting and the safety hazards that occur as a result. Without having to install physical lighting infrastructure (due to costs), we came up with an app idea that integrated with maps to show areas in which lighting both exists and does not exist. In order to create such an app, we could employ a crowdsourcing model to gather community support to build out the GIS capabilities and actually pinpoint areas without lighting. Additionally, we thought of overlaying layers of where crimes were most frequent and also geo-tagging for individual tracking as safety precautions and additional measures.
The underlying principle behind community-involvement (both in Threadless’ business model and the hope for the street-lighting app) lies in the inherent nature of individuals in a society to contribute. In the example of Threadless, involvement from users gave other users a creative outlet and opportunity to showcase their work. In the case of the app, involvement from Berkeley citizens would help not only themselves but the entire community in keeping people safe and providing navigation to avoid dangerous, less lit areas. In addition to the intangible reward of helping out others, we could also give credit to those contributors of information within the app.
Our case study on Threadless has shown us that a great way to capture the value created from a product is to create a community centered around it. Such a community whose members are engaged with the product and share ideas with each other is bound to grow because members are excited to encourage outsiders to join and share the synergies created in the community. We can apply this model to our city, San Jose.
San Jose is a critical part of Silicon Valley and its university San Jose State is the biggest supplier of engineers to the region. However, the city has difficulty competing with its neighbors for young talent. Out of the major tech companies, only Cisco and eBay are headquartered there. Graduates of UC Berkeley and Stanford typically flock to Mountain View and Cupertino to work in tech and live as transplants in San Francisco. In a reversal of the flight to the suburbs and a prime example of gentrification, these transplants are willing to make the long commute to the South Bay every day because their high-paying tech jobs afford them the opportunity to live in a city that’s full of life. San Jose currently cannot compete because it is very suburban, and its downtown lacks the energy that draws college graduates to live in San Francisco. Fortunately, the future BART extension to SJ should make it easier for Bay Area residents to visit SJ, which will increase demand for tourist attractions, restaurants, and other points of interests that will improve the vibrancy of the downtown area. This will attract more young graduates to come live in SJ instead of SF. The community will further expand when tech companies notice and want to open offices in SJ to hire its engineers, which creates a positive feedback loop that attracts even more tech companies and graduates looking to work at these firms.
Of course, the problem that young graduates aren’t coming to San Jose is not an isolated problem, but rather is interconnected with other issues. Downtown life alone is not enough when many residents in SJ are afraid of leaving their homes at night because of high crime rates. 25% of expenses are allocated to public safety, which is one of the largest categories in the the budget. A shift towards using using the Internet of Things to improve police operations can improve safety and efficiency. San Jose should implement a secure broadband network throughout the city to replace the radio communications method that police forces have relied on for decades. This will greatly increase the variety of communications options available to officers. For example, officers can use smartphones to quickly locate a specific area where citizens have identified threats using their phones and in New Zealand, the police use the 4G/LTE network to control traffic lights so that police traffic are given priority. These technologies can be used to create a more secure and sustainable community in San Jose.
Source: http://blogs.cisco.com/ioe/how-internet-of-things-is-transforming-public-safety
Our lecture in class today covered the case study of an online community and e-commerce site: Threadless. Threadless is a marketplace that encourages users to submit their artwork and creative ideas to the site platform. The most popular designs are then processed and printed onto products that are sold on the retail market. Threadless’ online platform reflects an innovative business model that focuses on creating a community. On the site, because of its user-generated content, members feel that they have a say in which products the company will sell. This sort of engagement creates a self-reinforcing effect, in which the users feel personally responsible for the success of the site. Because of this, Threadless has become not just a website for recreation but also a community built on the foundation of trust. What Threadless has done for itself is a model that we can apply when working on our own city projects.
Throughout the past few weeks, our team has been trying to figure out how we are going to approach our projects and provide value for our city, San Jose. As we have been accumulating research, listening to Professor Darwin’s lectures, and speaking with Param, we realized that for any substantial change to take place, it is important for the members themselves to take responsibility and actively contribute to the betterment of the community. To my surprise, this was actually the same advice we heard in India from multiple groups such as TERI and IIT Delhi. After hearing the advice of Professor Darwin and Mr. Singh, we are looking into several different ways to create community, encourage active engagement and foster trust in order to address several of the pain points in San Jose.
There are several pain points that San Jose is currently experiencing that can be leveraged to create a create a stronger community. As mentioned in my previous post, San Jose has sent a significant amount of its resources on public safety. About a third of all of the city’s resources have gone to maintaining public safety such as the police force and fire department. However, public safety has become an increasing concern in the city as the police department has shrunk as a result of rising pension costs. Rather than completely overhauling the budget, the city can take alternative steps to mitigate this problem in the long-run. The city can invest in IoT technologies that will ensure tighter surveillance o the city without increasing police force. In addition, citizens can participate in a night watch program that will allow them to carry technologies can record activity throughout the city. This solution will not only increase the amount of safety without drastically increasing costs, but also provide a chance for community members to feel involved and create a sense of responsibility for the city ultimately leading to stronger community cohesion.
Another pain point that can be solved while fostering trust within the community simultaneously revolves around capturing value from young professionals. Although San Jose has been deemed the heart of the Silicon Valley, the city surprisingly has not optimally captured the value that comes from the tech hub. Our team’s hypothesis is that although there are many companies in San Jose, young professionals have chosen to reside in larger cities such as San Francisco with greater amount of amenities and conveniences. To mitigate this issue, one of our initial proposals is to draw in young professionals who work in Silicon Valley not to just work but also reside in the city. This can be done by investments into creating more amenity structures such as bars, malls, and restaurants in the downtown area. In addition, the city can install infrastructure such as city-wide Internet accessibility to increase the overall efficiency and convenience for young officials who value such qualities in the city. This will also help to create a stronger youth community that may be more willing to give back to the city.
Stand Francisco is a communal marketplace where citizens sell their problems and city authorities buy them. It achieves the following goals through a variety of different ways:
1. Establishing a Meeting Place
Because most citizens of San Francisco have access to the Internet via smartphones, personal computers, or public libraries, creating an online platform that comprises discussion boards and chat rooms enables all members to access and interact with the community easily and anonymously (if preferred).
2. Triggering Engagement
Giving users permission to interact with city authorities will attract citizens to sign up for the platform. Registered members can talk directly with city officials via chat rooms, raise issues via discussion boards, and resolve problems via picture gallery.
3. Facilitating Exchange
Stand Francisco bridges the gap between citizens and city authorities by facilitating discussion and problem solving processes. Creating a space where citizens can report problems such as theft, broken light bulbs, and water leakages, Stand Francisco will allow the city officials to react to the citizen’s core needs quickly and efficiently.
4. Creating Incentives
If a citizen has an outstanding track record of reporting key issues of the city, he or she will be awarded through tax breaks, healthcare benefits, or stipends. Such programs effectively incentivize citizens to respond to problems promptly and honestly. Citizens will also be penalized if they report false issues or use the platform negatively. Penalties will be in the form of community service hours, tax increases, and reduction of credit.
Stand Francisco is the innovative solution to the problem of establishing an efficient and credible problem solving process. This online platform will be the center of development for future cities.
In class today, Professor Darwin walked us through a case study of a company called Threadless, an online t-shirt and apparel company. Threadless is also an online community that promotes independent artists and designers. At first, I was unsure how a case study of an online business would teach us about smart city design, but as the presentation went on, I was amazed at how the little features Threadless incorporates in its model can greatly affect how users interact with the product.
Threadless aimed to set itself up as an online community space, and it did so by comparing its business model to an art gallery. Much like an art gallery, the Threadless team looked at their stakeholders from every angle. In an art gallery, you have the proprietors, the artists, the people who are buying, and the people who are coming to admire. Similarly on Threadless, there are different features to cater to different stakeholders, such as the artists designing the apparel, the voters, the people visiting the page just to observe, etc.
When thinking about the implications in a city, I think one of the biggest takeaways from a high-level perspective is to always consider every level of stakeholder, not just the primary ones. For instance, in San Francisco, we have the citizens, the city officials, the businesses, etc. We also have the neighboring cities, the county officials, the state officials, etc. This scope of stakeholders can be expanded out multiple levels. Depending on the recommendation, we need to make sure we include the implications for different levels of stakeholders. Much like the casual observer in the art gallery, one of the most important stakeholder for any recommendation will be, as cheesy as it may sound, the world. If San Francisco wants to be the model smart city in the world, then any recommendation must also consider how indirect stakeholders will be impacted and how they will view the changes being made in the city.
Another key lesson from the Threadless case study was the idea of community empowerment. Giving citizens a sense of empowerment will encourage them to contribute to the community as they can guide what Threadless or the city will do next. Ryan touched on the main points of our discussion on how we want to find a way to incorporate the citizens into the public works system as a way to eliminate the middle steps. By bringing citizens closer to the decision-making body, they should feel like they have a better sense of ownership of how they are contributing to bettering their community. By crowdsourcing feedback, San Francisco can direct its services (and funding) to high-impact projects.
Taking this one step further, I would like to draw on another point the Threadless team explained quite eloquently. One of the issues we were trying to address during our group discussion was how to get citizens to engage with the app in the first place. Even with an incentive program, citizens may not feel compelled to contribute if the incentive is not strong enough. One point the Threadless CEO made about user engagement was that each initiative needs a catalyst. For Threadless, that catalyst is the designer, because they have a stake in how many people interact on Threadless through votes, purchases, etc. They will drive the engagement process by contacting their networks, encouraging people to log on, etc. Similarly, our recommendation will need a catalyst to make sure citizens engage with the service. One such catalyst could be the corporations who will be heavily invested in our recommendation. After our discussion with Param, we see that corporations will be a major source of innovation for us, as they will be providing us with the resources we need to move our project forward. Our next objective is to define exactly how corporations can help engage citizens, be it through jobs, discounts, or other incentives.
As part of the San Francisco group, I would like to expand on the challenges of implementing a citizen centric digital platform that would connect and strengthen the San Francisco community. As Ryan previously mentioned, the three main challenges would be (1) the initial cost to build the platform (2) getting user buy in and enough citizens on the system to create a network effect and (3) establishing public private partnerships to manage platform. In the next three paragraphs, I will delve into the implications of each challenge.
(1) Initial cost to build the digital platform: In today’s marketplace, the cost of building an app with multiple layers and customization capabilities can be around $150,000 as estimated by Overt app cost calculator. In a private sector setting, the net present value of this estimate paid over time would be enough to qualify the decision of whether or not to undertake the project. However, in a bureaucratic setting, the time and effort that would go into submitting Requests for Proposals for the digital platform and the additional red tape that would have to be crossed to revise and actually accept one, would have to be projected and incorporated into the cost estimate. This could be avoided if the city government were to build a digital platform in-house. However, a proper assessment would have to be done to ensure that the city has the internal skills and capabilities to develop and manage a digital platform and whether or not it can do so cost effectively.
(2) Obtaining Users on the System: Many start-ups have coined the term “network effect” to describe the phenomenon of obtaining the first 100K users. As in adoption of new technologies, we experience an “s” curve effect with a few “early adopters”, “early majority”, “late adopters”, and “laggards”. Some ways start-ups have obtained the “early majority” market, are through recommendation incentives. For example, Dropbox’s “space race” was one of the most successful marketing campaigns that resulted in a mass adoption by the University market in a record amount of time. If we could incentivize SF citizens to adopt our digital platform through recommendation incentives like those of Dropbox, we could obtain the “early adopters” quickly and thereby build off of a “network effect.”
(3) Establishing Public Private Partnerships: PPP’s are key to implementation throughout all stages of the community engagement platform. From building it, to incentivizing users through coupons etc, to managing the platform, PPP’s will be essential in the success of an efficient platform. Threadless was able to adapt to its customers because of the very private nature of the company. Since it was managed by a small team of executives, it was able to rapidly respond and address user concerns. The private nature of this relationship should be mocked when we develop our community engagement platform for the smart city of SF. The platform should be customizable and flexible so that it can respond to the needs of its users immediately.
In my SF team, I will be sure to address these three challenges and develop solutions to them when presenting our deliverable.
Day 15
In today’s lecture we had the opportunity to learn about how companies are creating innovative business models. The use case we learned today was a company called Threadless, which allows anyone to design and create a t-shirt, where the best (most voted one) are printed and sold directly from the site. The business ecosystem behind Threadless is built upon a community of idea sharing. This communal business model is pivotal in Threadless growth as a company as it allows consumers and creators take responsibility. With that being said, our group has begun assessing ways we would implement the ideals of Threadless business model to disrupt the City of Oakland. We as consultants hope to create a safe community while targeting the two main issues of Oakland: safety and education.
Specifically for the City of Oakland, it is imperative that they need a shift in their standing infrastructure for the topic of safety and education. The education system in Oakland is currently flawed with dropout rates siting at an all-time high. For the most part, Oakland would benefit significantly from a restricting business model (as learned in class). By utilizing IoT technology and the ideals of community building, it would be a good opportunity for the City of Oakland to partner with leading educational mobile applications to maybe come together and connect students with other elementary schools to share lectures, homework, and activities to create a community. I believe that collaboration between students and teachers should be instilled from a young age. More specifically, the pupil to teacher ratio, as shown on the City of Oakland’s financial statements, is 31:1 for grade 4-5 and 32:1 for 6-12 graders. At a young age, children living in Oakland are stripped away of a community. From personal experience, a community is a must. I really think it would be in Oakland’s best interest to come together and leverage open innovation by changing the classroom ways to a more interactive one.
To address the issues of public safety, after talking with Param we have started looking at use cases from South Korea’s Public Safety tracking technology. By utilizing this use case, we are able to take the pros and cons of the outcome to better assist Oakland. With Oakland having a crime rate 3 times higher than the national crime rate, as said by Forbes.com, it is imperative that we hit that pain point head on. Oakland Major, Libby Schaaf has stated that in order to decrease crime rates in Oakland, the police need modern tools (aka innovative technologies) to be effective and that starts with community base policing. Moving forward, Oakland has taken on debt to maintain solvency, cut expenses with layoffs and furloughs, and pursued a more informed, data-driven approach to policing crime.
One of the points I really took home from the threadless case is when one of the founders said “even if the business side did not exist, the website would still be going as a design sharing community.” This kind of strong community translates into customer loyalty and ultimately into the highest profit. Thus by fostering community, threadless has actually ENHANCED their revenue streams without INCREASING their expenses.
In terms of smart cities, I believe that by finding a technological solution that fosters a sense of public safety and community in Oakland, our group can decrease expenses diverted to public safety for Oakland. The public safety expenses account for HALF of Oakland’s spending and has not been entirely effective in reducing the crime rate. One way that this can be done is using IBM’s crime prediction and prevention analytics software. In a case study of Lancaster, CA where this system was implemented, the city saw:
-A 35 percent reduction in Part I crimes in 2010 and a 42 percent reduction in 2011 compared to the 2007 benchmark rate
-Over $800,000 savings in the partial year of 2010 when predictive analytics was implement- ed
-By using predictive and geographic analytics, Lancaster was able to gain over a million dol- lars in productivity on a year-over-year basis
– The City of Lancaster attained a ROI of 1301 percent in a payback period of 1.5 months af- ter implementing a SPSS and ArcGIS solution to fight crime
For a city to receive at 1301% payback in a period of 1.5 months is unbelievable — and if you scale this to the size of Oakland’s public safety budget, the city could be saving tens of millions per year with IBM’s crime prediction software. With the decreased crime rates, the people of Oakland will feel safer and have more opportunities to create community at no extra cost to the city! A smart crime monitoring and prevention system can COMBAT RECIDIVISM by understanding and focusing on serious and prolific offenders, PREDICT AND PREVENT crime before it happens, ENHANCE SITUATIONAL AWARENESS for officers through social media analytics or video analytics to detect suspicious activity as events unfold, Provide REAL-TIME INSIGHTS through GIS technology and geo-tagged crime data to deliver knowledge on surrounding locations and identify potential escape routes, OPTIMIZE resource deployment and measuring outcomes of decisions and crime-fighting initiatives.
This kind of system will move the city of Oakland to the right toward maturity while adding value, as shown on the chart below
At the beginning of class we took a look at the Threadless model. As an online marketplace that merges creation, collaboration, and consumption, Threadless emphasizes community-building within the clothing market. We came to the conclusion that Threadless fulfills a need in the apparel industry by fostering community through a platform, facilitating the design process, and creating trust. Members of the Threadless community can simultaneously design t-shirts, vote for their favorites, and buy the winners.
This innovative way of creating and capturing value all in one online space offers a similar opportunity for smart cities. In our meeting after class with Param Singh, we made progress in finalizing our focus areas for improving the city of Berkeley. The two projects we intend to focus on are mapping “safe corridors” to decrease crime rates and potentially using the Little Free Library Project as an inspiration for a similar scheme. Using sensor technology, we plan to identify dark spots that pose possible threats to pedestrians walking alone at night. Then, creating a mash-up app, we intend to map out these darker zones so that pedestrians can find “safe corridors” in which they can walk home safely. This will undoubtedly build a stronger community by not only reducing crime, but also by allowing users to share safe routes and creating trust among citizens throughout the community. Second, the Little Free Library Project proposes an intensified sense of community as different individuals can lend and borrow books from communal outdoor bookcases. This allows a more efficient use of resources as knowledge through books is shared openly. Furthermore, employing smart technologies such as sensors for automated lighting will heighten the user experience. The open channel of communication through the app and the open innovation through the Little Free Library Project is just one facet of the Threadless model that can be applied to build not just smart cities, but smart communities.